Three quarters of a century ago, eight teenage girls came to Atlantic City on Labor Day weekend to compete in a bathing beauty contest. The year was 1921, and they arrived by train at this sequined and cacophonous city, flanked by miles of boardwalk that had originally been built to keep sand off the posh hotel carpets--this resort that had become a kind of Broadway by the beach, packed with diversions and enormous crowds. It was a city of pure contradiction, constructed on a wilderness of swamps and dunes, a place where the average working man could arrive by train and hire a "servant" for a buck to roll him down the boardwalk in a wicker chair. Doesn't it somehow make perfect sense that Atlantic City's swimsuit contest, dreamed up by the Chamber of Commerce to extend the summer holiday, would evolve into the most famous beauty pageant in modern history? A pageant as innocent and corrupt as the city that gave birth to it--and as the country that invented that city.
MISS AMERICA. FOR A SKIN SHOW, she's been caught in the crossfire of colossal cultural battles: women's rights, pornography, changing racial and religious values. Feminist poet Robin Morgan claimed that the pageant inspired the formal launching of the women's movement in 1968, when a crowd of protesters burned their bras, torched host Bert Parks in effigy, stormed the exhibition hall, and accused the contest of being lily-white, racist, and pro-military. Since then, Miss America has changed with the times: she has been black, deaf, and a social activist with platforms ranging with dignity-- from AIDS prevention to children's self esteem and aging although she still struts in a bathing suit.
In the last decade, interest in the title has been flagging, and the pageant has had to offer gimmicks like k viewer phone-in votes and two-piece swimsuits to boost television ratings. Still, every September, at least 20 milli, on Americans stay home on a Saturday night to scorn or applaud ~ the winner and see the kitschy crown passed on. If you're one who observes that annual ritual, you may watch out of simple nostalgia Miss America as a kind of Proustian madeleine of ' days long gone, when you were a girl and she was a queen. Or you may watch for the treacly high camp of it all, or just out of an ambivalent blend of disgust and fascination. Yet somehow, at 78-years-old, this icon still lives.
The fact is, Miss America informs us about our culture's ideals and conflicts. That's what all beauty pageants do, according to Richard Wilk, professor of anthropology at Indiana University. "They're always about fundamental contradictions in the culture," he declares. "How else could you get millions of people to watch a bunch of relatively untalented women in bathing suits?" The Miss America contest has always knit together in its middle-class queen the deep schisms in American society. Whether her contestants flaunt pierced belly buttons or Ph.D.s in veterinary medicine, wear pants or ballgowns, Miss America is a mirror of America, even now.
So what is she really saying about us-and why do we need to know, anyway?
o We're a big clubhouse, but we're not sure you should be a member. We may be a melting pot of races and types, but we have a fairly inflexible standard of beauty. Almost all the Miss Americas have been white. According to Frank Deford, author of There She Is, the composite contestant in 1971 was 19 years old, 5 feet 6 inches, 119 pounds, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion. And she hasn't changed much since then. "Miss America is the official standard of beauty, kind of like the dollar bill," observes Wilk. "The rest of us schlubs are not necessarily ugly We may be beautiful, but by different standards." As an example, he cites Monica Lewinsky, with her plump curves and formerly big hair. "She is extremely beautiful by the small-town standards of the Midwest, and that big hair is the peak of fashion in southern Indiana where I live. But she does not look like a Miss America."
Give the pageant a bit of credit, though. The first black winner was chosen in 1984--Vanessa Williams (and her replacement, Suzette Charles). Since then, three more African-Americans have worn the crown. Williams, with her fine-boned features, was said to match the "white" ideal, but Marjorie Vincent, the 1991 titleholder, with her very dark skin and full figure, represented a different, and more diverse, vision of beauty. In 1997, the contestant from Colorado was Hispanic and Miss Washington, D.C., was of Indian descent.
"More Latina young women and African-Americans are entering the contest, and those audiences are now watching," says New York City psychologist Elizabeth Debold, author of Mother Daughter Revolution: From Good Girls to Great Women. "The pageant may be providing a way for immigrant and outsider groups to enter the mainstream."
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